ETHICS OF ENGINEERING

Ethics of Engineering

Whistle Blowing

Introduction

Whistle-blowing has been defined as “the act of a man or woman who, believing that the public interest over-rides the interest of the organization he serves publicly 'blows the whistle' if the organization is involved in corrupt, illegal, fraudulent or harmful activity”. It has also been defined as “the disclosure by organizational members (former or current) of illegal, immoral or illegitimate practices under the control of their employers, to persons of organizations that may be able to affect the action”. Many other definitions of whistle-blowing exist, though they run into problems of inclusion and exclusion and create problems for the researcher attempting to operationalize the concept as a form of organizational communication. Whistle blowing takes place when a current or former organization member reports an internal wrongdoing to a party who is capable of taking action to correct the illegal, unethical or illegitimate activity. Hooks et al. (1994) and Ponemon (1994) were the first to formally recognize whistle blowing, or upward communication, as a key factor in an organization's internal control environment. Since these studies, organizations have started to embrace internal whistle blowing as an important detector of organizational wrongdoing, including financial fraud. In fact, Kuppusamy and Fie (2004) find that whistleblowers are a very crucial source of detection, second only to the company's auditor, in detecting wrongdoing.

Given the recognized importance of whistleblowers, a large stream of research has looked into the various factors that affect the whistle blowing decision. The majority of this research attempts to explain whistle blowing behavior by studying the individual, organizational, and/or contextual factors that may be related to an observer's decision to either report the wrongdoing or to remain silent. Individual variables such as ethical judgment, accountability, and fear of retaliation, job level, job satisfaction/performance, employee loyalty, age and gender have been shown to be related to whistle blowing. Organizational variables such as communication climate, retaliatory environment, and supervisor support have also been shown to be related to whistle blowing. Finally, the contextual variables that have been shown to be related to whistle blowing include the severity and type of the occurrence, the moral intensity of the issue, the amount of evidence to prove the wrongdoing, and the degree to which the transgression personally affects the whistleblower. Mesmer-Magnus and Viswesvaran (2005) conduct a meta-analysis of the correlations between whistleblower characteristics and both whistle blowing intentions and actions as found in 21 published whistle blowing studies. Their results provide much insight into whistle blowing research, as they find that the contextual variables provide the strongest overall relationship to whistle blowing. Specifically, the contextual variables that are significantly related to whistle blowing intent include organizational climate, threat of retaliation, and supervisor support, with sample-size weighted mean observed correlations of 0.28, -0.27, and 0.28, respectively. In addition to this established stream of research addressing the individual, organizational and situational correlates of whistle blowing, researchers have begun to address how current emotions may affect individuals' ethical decision-making ...